Peter Krahn

My name is Peter. I’m a pretty normal guy. I’m 26 years old, a Star Wars fan boy, a lover of nearly every genre of music, a collector of strange and interesting glass bottles, and an expecting father. I play too many video games, appreciate vintage and quality of a good rum, and do some small electrical engineering as a hobby. I’m no Nikola Tesla, but I’ve built some pretty cool gadgets. My main hobby is collecting strange skills. So far I’ve learned whittling, bow hunting, lock picking, graphic design, and computer repair/maintenance. I’m working on programming right now. It’s not going well.

I put a great deal of my personal, and post secondary, time in to researching what not having a preference meant. I have read studies, written papers (so many papers), and debated on bisexuality. After everything I have been through, everything I have researched, and everything I have heard from others like myself, I am finally happy and proud to be a bisexual man. We aren’t going through some phase. We aren’t “confused”. We aren’t just “greedy”. We are bisexual, and we deserve the same respect as any straight, gay, or trans human being. That is what I will always fight for.

We aren’t “just greedy”, we aren’t all polygamists, we aren’t “confused”, and we aren’t all sluts and whores. Did I miss anything? These stereotypes show distrust, fear, and ignorance. These negative ideas are represented in every sexual preference, if you decide to look for the worst in people. Grow up.

I grew up around a hyper-religious family, with hyper religious restrictions on sexuality and gender. I never really saw a difference between boys and girls (besides the obvious) while I was growing up but my views were laughed at as naivety as a child and seen as offensive after I had grown. As a teenager I dated a few girls and was “relieved” to find out that I was sexually interested, but there was always that thought that maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t the way I was. I tried dating a guy and had a personal crisis when I realized that I felt the same about him as I had my previous relationships. I had never been told about bisexuality. I was taught that there were two ways to be, and that you were one or the other. If you were straight, you were normal. If you were gay there was something wrong with you. What did it mean if I was neither? Or, more accurately, both? I made a decision then; to not limit myself. I decided I would find out where this path, that felt both scary and “right”, would take me. While my family wasn’t aware, other people were. I suffered violence, rejection, emotional abuse, and more miseries than I care to recount. I later met other bisexual people and finally felt like I had an identity. Like I wasn’t some unnatural freak in a binary society.

When I finally told my family, they ceased contact for several years, before adopting a “don’t ask” attitude. I keep hoping that one day they will realize that I’m still me, and not some pseudo-human in the place of their family member.

I have found the best thing about being bisexual is I don’t have to limit myself to rigid sexual standards. I have experienced more from my past partners than anyone could that has a specific preference one way or the other. I can see sexual attraction in so many places, it’s almost mind blowing. There are so many beautiful forms, personalities, attitudes, fashions, and…other things…between men and women, that I could not imagine having been limited my whole life. I have been with my partner for quite some time now, but I wouldn’t trade my past experiences for anything in the world.

People in my life have generally reacted pretty terribly. Over the past few years it has been taken much better by friends and equal rights advocates I have met, but I am still met with distrust and a lack of understanding more often than not. I hope to help change that for others.